This Simple Logo Is More Clever Than You Might Think

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Much has already been said about the Whitney Museum’s new graphic identity. Rolled out May 21, the spindly zigzag design has been both praised for its modernity and criticized for its simplicity. Created in conjunction with the museum’s 2015 move from its current Upper East Side digs to a Renzo Piano-designed building at the base of the High Line, the zigzag is the result of a nearly two-year collaboration between the Whitney and Amsterdam-based design team Experimental Jetset.

The partnership is evident. The design studio, made up of Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers and Danny van den Dungen, is known for its love of simple, organized design (and yes, Helvetica). Accordingly, the new Whitney logo harbors many of the design studio's aesthetic hallmarks—sans-serif type, snapped cleanly to a grid – but this time they've added a clever twist. You see, the "W" is responsive, meaning the Whitney design department (who handles the creation of all museum materials) can bend, stretch and flip it to fit whatever canvas it’s on. The ever-changing zigzag is a clear departure from the stable word mark created 13 years ago by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, but it's this disruptive design mentality that led the Whitney to chose Experimental Jetset for the redesign.

“Working with Experimental Jetset was not the conventional path, which appealed to the Whitney,” said Hilary Greenbaum, director of graphic design at the Whitney. “We appreciated that they had a point of view.”

Like most successful design processes, that point of view evolved from its earliest versions. In the beginning, Experimental Jetset had a much more traditional logo in mind. The team had originally proposed a fully typographical image: a zigzag reflecting the acronym “WM,” which would be used in a mostly static way. The Whitney was quick to nix the “M” (they preferred a standalone “W” for “the Whitney”) and made it clear that they were only interested in a single-image approach to the design. Meaning, whatever Experimental Jetset came up with needed to be flexible enough to accommodate the various proportions of the artwork the Whitney has historically used in its promotional materials.

“The Whitney definitely pushed our boundaries,” the Experimental Jetset team told Wired. “We can still remember the first meeting, when we had to answer some pretty serious questions – for example, what is the added value of an European design studio for an American museum? When does the graphic identity of a museum become too corporate? Questions like that. During the meetings we had with the Whitney, we constantly had to deal with very critical questions – but the discussions were always constructive. We really left those meetings wiser.”

Those ideological challenges, along with the Whitney’s aesthetic mandates, led the team to the idea of “responsive W,” a flexible version of the letter that will bend to showcase the Whitney's featured artwork, regardless of shape or size.

“I've heard that when apartment hunting, you know you've found the right place when you start imagining where all your stuff will go. Upon seeing this mark, I immediately started imagining all the designs I could make with this system, and the possibilities seemed endless,” Greenbaum said. “I was also struck by its simplicity. Intuitively and conceptually, it felt right for us.”

The design’s fragile, bent line is paired with a new version of Neue Haas Grotesk, a clean sans-serif font that was designed by New York type designer Christian Schwartz. And though both Experimental Jetset and Greenbaum believe the design to be loaded with symbolism (read all about that here), there have inevitably been detractors who view the zigzag to be, well, just sort of boring.

“Generally speaking, minimal structures offer a lot of space for interpretation. They require something from the viewer – an active eye, an active mind,” Experimental Jetset explained. “You can not just sit back, let the story unfold, and be entertained in a passive way – you have to add your own references, your own views to it. In the end, we believe that you can only get something out of it if you are willing to put something in it.”